[rmc]

The non-techy users never made good use of the freedoms of the PC-era, so to them their environment was just as restricted as the Kindle or iPad environment.

Yes and no. They didn't create software, but they created content. Just look at Facebook & other social network sites. It's full of user generated content. Likewise people generated content to print out with word processors, and they generated content as emails to send to people. They also generated photographic content. However pretty much all of this is now done in web browsers, so in a way, you can generate all this content with iPad/Kindle.